Alexandra Grey was a legal researcher and advocacy trainer at a Chinese not-for-profit in Beijing from 2010-2013, continuing there after a stint with AusAID's Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development program. Back home (Australia), she has lectured in law and policy since 2010 and was a practising commercial solicitor before she moved into the NGO and academic arenas. Alexandra has studied Chinese (Mandarin) and Linguistics at postgraduate levels and is now a PhD Candidate at Macquarie University.

In her time involved in the aid sector in Asia, Alex Grey realized that many aid workers were turning their noses up at helping colleagues with English tasks. While many international aid workers are hired for their technical skills, Alex argues that language training is being dismissed too readily.

In her third post on literacy and development, Alex Grey examines some of the issues associated with using literacy rates as a measurement to inform development policy, and shows how problematic approaches to monitoring literacy can lead to problems on the ground.

In an exciting cross-post with The China Beat, Alex continues analysing of the role literacy and development, this time in the Middle Kingdom. She looks at the minority communities who populate most of China’s developing regions, their bilingual schooling (or lack of it) and the relationship between their languages, their cultural identities, and the State.

Literacy is not a set of skills independently learned regardless of social and cultural context, nor is it simply synonymous with schooling. In part 1 of a three-part series, Alex Grey argues that unless ethnographic understandings inform literacy campaigns and other development projects, they are likely to be less successful or, worse, perpetuate development as a form of power and...

Internet microblogging in China has been touted by some as the way forward for civil society, but this kind of participation does not include development of civil society institutions. The Red Cross Society of China has just been at the centre of a big scandal taking place largely in the microblog sphere. Does this showcase a tech-savvy side of civil...